Still Waiting for Salvation
by Hitokiri Gentatsu
Summary: A piece on Kenshin's thoughts during the Bakumatsu just after he kills Kyosato


Still Waiting for Salvation

By: Hitokiri Gentatsu

Disclaimer/summary: A piece on Kenshin's thoughts during the Bakumatsu just after he kills Kyosato Akira. The usual disclaimers apply, as always. I'm not sure where this piece came from. It could have been that I was watching the OVAs for the zillionth time and reading a manga translation of the same story at the some time. Or it could be that I was watching the trailer for the new RK OVA online. I'm not sure. Anyway enjoy!

"You are the one who showed me this new way to live"

Himura Kenshin

OVA 3

The night was dark and a full moon was just rising, washing everything in the sleeping city with a faint silver glow that seemed to be emanating from the spire of the Five Story Pagoda but the boy who stood at the river's edge paid little heed to the beauty of the moonlight that was shimmering on the waters before him. 

His mind was occupied with other matters.

Any bystander or passerby would simple see a boy but there was far more to him then what could be seen on first glance. If a passerby were to take a second look they would find an enigma, a person whose very identity seemed to be as elusive as the moon's light. On the one hand, here was a boy who was not yet a man but at his side he carried the two swords of a man of the samurai class as if he had done so for years. His slight frame and almost feminine appearance seemed to indicate weakness but he moved with the fluid grace of one well trained in the art of the sword and anyone who had fought him knew better than to even suggest he was weak. 

If anyone were to take an even closer look they would see that his fair skin and red hair spoke of a foreign ancestry but he would merely tell you that his family had been farming the same land for countless generations and his skin and hair came to him from some ancestor or other. His face was smooth, with no trace of hair and it spoke of youth and innocence but it was marred by a recently made, diagonal cut that was still bleeding. The youth put a hand over the wound and the blood from it seeped through his hands.

His eyes were trained on the river but he really wasn't seeing it. Those eyes, which a few moments before had held an amber rage in them, now were a flat and dead bluish-purple and if one was to look into them they would see the reflection of a soul in turmoil, a soul who was quickly reaching the breaking point and one that was struggling to save itself from the source of its torment. He never let anyone get that close though. He couldn't let them see the confusion in his heart or the pain in his soul. He couldn't allow that weakness to be shown to others. He was known as the strongest.

"I am becoming a monster, one that I cannot control. There is a darkness in my soul that will never leave."

He could feel the darkness growing within him like some deadly disease that was bent on his destruction. He could feel it envelope him every time he killed. It made his vision darken and his heart turn cold and it snaked through his being like a poison. He could feel nothing whenever the darkness took over. There was only a cold, white rage that sung in his head and the metallic tang of blood in his nose as he watched it arc through the air, staining his katana and the ground crimson. Sometime it fell around him like soft red rain, staining his cold body with its warmth. 

After the rain of blood finished falling, he would return to the light again but each time that light grew dimmer. Each time it took longer to return to the person he was before he had accepted the hitokiri's sword. The darkness within him was growing stronger with each life he took and that darkness was becoming more and more difficult to control. He felt as if he was losing more of himself to the hitokiri he was becoming and he could see no way to stop it. 

He was drowning in the dark, shadowy existence of the hitokiri and it was slowly killing him. 

Not that he hadn't tried to climb out of that shadow countless times. He had tried to make friends with the other Ishinshishi that stayed at the inn where he lived. He had wanted to befriend the girls who worked at the inn and maybe become more then friends with one of them, but he was still alone in this damned darkness. The men were friendly enough but he was never able to fit in with them. They were all far more experienced than he was and most of them were also far older. The women were happy to mother the young man and to allow him to draw water for them from the well but they had their sights on other men.

He never fit in among the others. He was different and special.

They were all more experienced then he was and understood what they were fighting for. Although he believed in the cause as deeply as they did he had no real understanding of the politics behind it or the inner workings of the rebellion. He only saw the suffering going on all around him and he had to do what he could to end it.

Then there was his title.

Hitokiri...

The other samurai were just soldiers, an honorable profession for a samurai, but he was an assassin and that held no honor and stained him, polluting his soul and making it impure. Everyone feared him and feared the instant death he brought. To fight him was said to mean certain death and it was known that no one could escape him once they were his targets.

"Like that young man in the alley tonight."

He put his hand on his wounded cheek again finding it was still bleeding, still stinging with old regrets that were fast growing numb within his cold heart.

His enemies feared him for the number of men he was rumored to have slain in the year since he had first come to Kyoto, but the Ishinshishi feared him more because they knew the true numbers he had slain. For that reason alone they never got too friendly with or to close to the red-haired man who seemed to have death hovering near him.

The boy began to walk, taking a long, circuitous route back to the inn, his mind still occupied with his dark thoughts. The Ishinshishi and everyone else feared the shadow called the Hitokiri Battousai but what no one else knew or even suspected was that Himura Kenshin feared him too. He feared what he was becoming: a heartless, bloodthirsty killer who lived on the edge of madness. A man who was hovering inches from the abyss between life and death, between the light and the darkness, and between salvation and damnation. He knew in his heart what he was becoming and knew he had willingly chosen to become Katsura's soldier of chaos. He had chosen the hitokiri's cruel sword and he had willingly accepted its consequences before he truly understood them. No one had forced this decision on him. It had been his choice to leave his master to help those who were suffering at the hands of the Bakufu. It was his decision alone that had led him to this dark path and the shadowy existence of a hitokiri.

His and no other.

Yet from the beginning, he had felt there was something he was forgetting, something of importance that he had failed, in his idealistic view of things, to take into consideration. He had been so focused in the beginning on the lives he could save with his sword and on protecting the lives of the innocent that he hadn't stopped to consider or even to bother with the means by which he would be doing so. He had been told by Katsura what the condition of the world was and what was required to improve that condition. Katsura had asked the young but talented swordsman to kill for him, knowing what the boy did not know: that this life would destroy his very soul, twisting it into something corrupt and evil. Kenshin had walked with open eyes into the solitary life of a hitokiri in the mistaken notion that he could change the world with the edge of his katana. 

But in doing so he had forgotten about the most important thing of all: his soul.

Now he was a part of the darkness and chaos of war-torn Kyoto and he could feel himself becoming numb to the killing he did. He was beginning not to care about life, whether it be his own or another's and the part of himself that was the hitokiri was beginning to cast his enemies in the role of cruel monsters with no right to live instead of thinking of them as people not unlike the Ishin. What scared him the most was that he was beginning to grow numb not only to the killing but to the feeling that those he killed were people who were just trying to live as best they could. Everything around him was gray now, a gray that was tinged with the crimson of the blood he spilt and he could see no way out of this life he had chosen. The rage that built up inside him whenever he became the hitokiri was growing more difficult to control. Soon he knew it would throw him over the edge and he would be lost in its madness and rage, unable to stop killing. 

He was losing the most important battle of his life.

And his soul was forfeit. His once unstained soul was now dark with the blood of the hundreds he had killed in cold blood and the sword his master had given him on good faith now thirsted for blood. The Hiten Mitsurugi Ryuu his master had taught him to use to protect others was now dishonored and tarnished by the thoughtless actions of one idealistic youth who had failed to listen to his master when it mattered most. He had failed the one person who had ever cared about him as a human being and the one person he had believed in from the beginning. The only one he trusted with all his heart and soul.

"I am sorry, Shisho. Sorry for everything."

He was profoundly sorry that he hadn't listened at the time, that he had angrily left his master, that he had let his feeling be swayed by the people in the nearby village. But most of all he was sorry that he had so dishonored his master's teachings and the Hiten Mitsurugi Ryuu and that he continued to dishonor it every time he swung his sword in the name of 'justice'. 

He could never go back to his master now as stained as he was. 

His decisions weighed heavily on his already overburdened soul and dishonoring his master weighed most of all. He wished daily that he could turn back the hands of time back to the day he had accepted the hitokiri's bloodstained sword or, better yet, back to the day he had argued with his master about the state of the world and left. If he could change either of these events then... but it was a hopeless dream and such dreams had no place in the life of hitokiri. Nothing could ever change the decisions he had made and he had no one to blame but himself in the end.

Now he had to live with the consequences of his actions and live with the knowledge that he had dishonored the Hiten Mitsurugi Ryuu and its teachings. He had to live with the darkness and numbness of spirit his decisions had created. He had to live with the numbness in his mind, the coldness in his heart and the hitokiri's rage in his soul. He returned to the inn and cleansed himself from the night of killing and once again sent up this prayer for his salvation.

"Please help me find a way out of this darkness before it's too late to turn back. Give me the strength to hold back the shadow in my own heart long enough for something to turn the tide of this battle."

He changed his clothing and sat in the window of his rooms, watching the stars come out and spinning the top he had carried with him from childhood.

And once again he waited for salvation.


End file.
